Nick Loper is a veteran affiliate marketer, author, and a lifelong student in the game of business. His latest role is as Chief Side Hustler at SideHustleNation.com, a growing community of part-time business owners. Need a leg-up in getting your biz off the ground but short on time? Grab Nick’s free "Cliff’s Notes"-style guide to the world’s best business books here. Follow Nick on Twitter at @nloper. Here’s the deal – in our chosen example of ‘how to kiteboard’, there were just over 96,000 websites that popped up in a simple Google search on the keyword. Plus – I hit the refresh button 10-times and the only two PPC ad’s for the same keyword were the only two ad’s that were shown on each attempt. Meaning, there is very little ‘paid for’ competition.

Joining our affiliate program is free and easy to get started. Since we have partnered with TUNE by HasOffers, which is a leading provider of affiliate links and program tracking, you will have access to all the tools you need to start earning through your partnership. Once you join the program, you will gain access to custom tracking links, in a single, simple line of code. You can add the pre-coded lines of HTML code to your website for simple creative banner tracking and use your custom tracking URL links by replacing your regular URL links with affiliate text links within your articles and social media posts. If you run into problems or have questions, you can contact your dedicated affiliate management team for support.

This is one of my favorite Amazon Affiliate Websites because it’s so freaking cool! These guys gather up the coolest gadgets, gifts, tech and oddities from Amazon and around the web to showcase on their website. These are gag gifts and fun gadgets people love to buy. They likely use a SEO tool like SEMrush to find great blog post ideas. This site uncovers the cool, often hidden, things of the internet and all you have to do is click on one of the Amazon Affiliate links to buy it from the Amazon store. ThisIsWhyIAmBroke works with more than just Amazon, but it’s one of their biggest revenue sources. It’s entirely possible to create a website just like this.

VigLink works a bit differently than other affiliate programs in that it is specifically designed for bloggers. Instead of affiliates picking and choosing which merchants to work with, VigLink uses dynamic links that automatically change to work with merchants that VigLink has determined are offering the highest conversation rates and/or commissions at any given moment.

A niche can be something broad, but most affiliate marketers will drill down into sub-categories. For example, I may want to have a website about cars, but that is way too broad. So, maybe I’ll focus on just Ford vehicles. Even then, the niche could be too broad, so I might dig down deeper and have a site that solely focuses on the Ford Mustang. I might even decide to take it one step further and focus on classic For Mustangs. Heck, I might even focus on a specific year, such as the 1969 Ford Mustang, and I would be THE expert for that very specific niche.
While the traffic estimates are lower than some of the other sites on this list, people in the baby gear niche are an important customer base because they definitely purchase products. This is a big industry and I would guess that the conversion rate for this site is slightly higher than OutDoorGearLab.com. Typically when someone researches a baby product, they are typically looking to buy that baby product. If someone is researching a tent, they may just be looking around at different options that they can compare for their next camping trip – not necessarily to buy that tent. Most of their traffic is organic, and continuing the trend of well ranked long form content, their top post is 8,800 words long (which is a beast of an article). If I had to take a guess at revenue, it would probably be north of 30k per month for this site based on traffic. You now have a fully functional WordPress website with a great hosting company! That wasn't so hard, was it!? From this point on, your main task is to publish as much content as possible. This site has tons of tutorials and articles on how to grow your affilaite marketing business, but in order for you to fully understand how to publish content and make money with your affiliate marketing blog, check out this article. Best of luck to you as you grow your business! :) Want even more help? Check out this incredible affiliate marketer training program and community of people growing an affiliate business just like you! Finding a good nich is a bit of a process. You can’t just choose a niche on a whim. Instead, you need to have specific research tools so that you know what people are searching for in search engines, along with how much competition there is for your niche. If you want to get into more advanced training, including all the tools you’ll need to perform niche research, I highly recommend this training program.

Ah, I see now, I was totally confusing the “competition” in Adwords with the low competition you talk about in your LongTail handbook. I actually used it as part of my screening criteria…oops. So I was looking for >1000 local searches, >$1.00 and Low Competition. I think I understand now to ignore the Competition column in the Adwords tool when searching for keywords. Thanks, guys!

Hi Jamie! Thank you for the great information. I just learned about affiliate marketing last week. The source however, is an older couple who work for World Wide Dreams Builders (WWDB). So, basically Amway. After researching a bit. I have no interest in WWDB and. (It sounds like years of recruiting people with minimal payout) Though, I am highly intrigued by e-commerce and affiliate marketing. Before your post the company I recognized was Amazon. Can you please tell me if that will be the best 1st step. I am currently an unemployed student Veteran. So plan to fully emerge into this business regime and would greatly appreciate your advice on this!!!

In addition, we spent thousands of hours interviewing hundreds of today's most successful affiliate marketing masters. This book is a compilation of their secrets and proven successful ideas. Additionally, we give you hundreds of tips and tricks to ensure your website is optimized for maximum search engine effectiveness, which will drive business to your Web site and increase sales and profits. You will find actual case studies from companies who have used our techniques and achieved unprecedented success. If you are interested in learning hundreds of hints, tricks, and secrets on how to implement affiliate marketing, optimizing your website for maximum search engine effectiveness, developing a cost-effective marketing campaign, and ultimately earning enormous profits, this book is for you.

Giving away a free informational product such as an e-book, an email series or a mini-course is a popular tactic many affiliate marketers use. Usually, your readers will have to provide their email addresses to receive the product from you. You can then use this to sell to them via email marketing. Additionally, an informational product can generate interest in the actual product you're trying to sell. If your product is popular enough and brings enough traffic to your site, you could also monetize the traffic in other ways, such as AdSense. SellHealth — SellHealth is a health affiliate network. It’s free for affiliates to join, should their applications be accepted. All of SellHealth’s sales are made through company-owned websites, meaning affiliates don’t need to facilitate sales on their own sites. This eliminates the possibility of error and increases consumer trust, as they are sent to a legitimate brand site to complete their purchases. Affiliate marketing is actually really simple; you promote, or even just mention someone else’s product. Then someone comes along, clicks the link you provide, buys the product, and you get a commission on the sale, which is sometimes as high as 75% of the price of the product! Affiliate marketing can be a powerful tool to make large amounts of money, without doing a lot of work. However, while affiliate marketing is an easy concept, you need to know what you are doing. There are specific, proven strategies and steps that you must follow in order to build a successful affiliate marketing business online. Lots of people try affiliate marketing for the first time and fail, because they don’t have the roadmap to follow. Now Tom's Hardware publishes their own reviews, and on top of their display ad revenue, they are making a significant portion of money from Amazon Affiliate links. The site is already well known for reliable content about Personal Computing, so it made sense to turn up the content generation to attract more organic search volume. It would be tough to estimate monthly revenue for this site, but it's highly likely that it generates 7 figures per month.
Back in these early days, the site was still called “Tom’s Hardware and Performance Guide” and its domain was sysdoc.pair.com — pair.com being a Pittsburgh-based hosting company. Today’s domain, tomshardware.com, was added on September 11, 1997, followed by additional language versions over time, including German, Japanese, Polish, French, Chinese, Italian, Turkish and others — some operated by Tom’s Guides Publishing, Inc., and others based on franchise agreements. My domain currently has a DA of 55 and I get 250,000-300,000+ pageviews/month. Interestingly enough, I had similar earnings on Amazon when I had a lower DA and fewer pageviews (just 175,000). I don’t know how many pageviews all of my Amazon posts have, but the main ones that deliver nice income probably vary from around 1,000 – 6,000 pageviews per month each. It looks like it’s mainly 10 articles driving these sales. Disclosure of Material Connection: Some of the links on this page above are “affiliate links.” This means if you click on the link and purchase the item, I will receive an affiliate commission. Regardless, I only recommend products or services I use personally and believe will add value to my readers. I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255: “Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising.”

1. To become an affiliate marketer, you should strongly consider focusing on recurring revenue; this means that the flow of income can be routinely predictable from month to month instead of sporadic and in small and short bursts spread over several months. Recurring revenue, or residual income, is money that is continuously earned while no work is currently and presently being accomplished. All of the time has already been invested; this is good when trying to eliminate the guesswork when it comes to being able to maintain a steady income.

Affiliate Marketing is based on revenue sharing and is a type of incentives program. The goal of marketing is to build an alliance with a brand, product, service, or company, and market these services to people online. The Affiliated Marketing consultant shares in a percentage of the company’s profits in exchange for bringing them valued business and gained exposure. The same marketing advertising concepts used in television and print ads are applied here, only the platform that is used to entice and attract the consumers is on the internet. I’ve been in the ‘real world’ of marketing for 20-years. It’s only over the last 18-months that I have become a huge student of everything internet marketing related, as part of my quest to become a Virtual CEO – leaving me to not only live the life I want to, but continue to grow my brick ‘n mortar business, as well create and launch a huge amount of online business entities as well.

So this is a niche I guess. This is an interesting example of a site built around a high price item that I could see people willing to buy online rather than a store. This doesn’t leave a lot of room to expand into other hot tub areas, but if your focus is “inflatable hot tubs” then go for it. I can’t imagine they update it too often, the last time seems to be August 2015, but what’s new in the world of inflatable hot tubs?

Hi Rae, I think the right niche is the most important step in affiliate marketing. If you choose the wrong niche, you can be doomed from the very beginning. Need a buying niche not just one where people are looking for information. Also you only mentioned it briefly at the end, I think promoting something you know about or is your passion makes the process a lot easier. Great post though, Tom.

You can put up banners on your site, to promote your affiliate offers. Most affiliate programs will usually provide their own creatives when you sign up for their offers. All you have to do is insert the banner on a highly trafficked page (your affiliate tracking is usually embedded within the code). Banner ads in the right locations can do a great job of driving sales.

The best review sites (like BestReviews.com buy them all independently and test them without bias) but anyway, you could always review products you already own and use (recommended) or just not focus on product reviews at all, it's just one of 1000's of ways to make money as you should be able to see from the post that shares endless examples of ways people make money other than reviewing products.

What do you think about when you hear the phrase, “most profitable niches“? Surely you’re thinking about products with a high-value price tag, right? So that’s why we have included the category, expensive hobbies in our list, and not just any hobbies in general. These are hobbies that can involve golfing or even flying drones – where the equipment are pretty pricey, and so your take-home commission will make you smile from ear to ear. And what about joining another company's affiliate program? It's all about extra revenue. Think about your customers' needs: What other products or services would interest your site visitors? Join those affiliate programs. Affiliate programs can increase your sales with no upfront cost to you. It just takes a little time to plan your strategy and select the partners that will have the greatest impact on your business.
I’ll talk about adding advertising to your book blog in the next post in this series (hey, there’s no reason to limit yourself to one source of income!), but, in the meantime, you may want to check out How You Can Make Money Promoting My Ebooks (and other people’s too), a post I did a couple of months ago. It talks more about Smashwords, in particular, and how to find authors offering high affiliate percentages over there.
The best review sites (like BestReviews.com buy them all independently and test them without bias) but anyway, you could always review products you already own and use (recommended) or just not focus on product reviews at all, it's just one of 1000's of ways to make money as you should be able to see from the post that shares endless examples of ways people make money other than reviewing products.
Look for a gravity score of 30 or more, because these products have a proven track record of selling well for a number of different affiliates. Products, especially new products, with gravity scores under 30 may work but are more risky. Gravity scores of greater than 100 mean the product’s popular. You could have competition, but don’t worry about that. The important thing is that there’s lots of demand. Thank you so much! You've been an inspiration throughout. The way you wrote about TIWIB, and how they drive insane traffic from social media is mind blowing. I am amazed that even going viral on a social site like pinterest for one day can build our brand identity huge. Am I correct? Now I need to get going with my first affiliate site, come up with a unique idea and learn how to drive traffic from each source. I feel Adsense is not so rewarding.

Have a plan — As an affiliate, you aren’t entirely responsible for the sales of this company, but you are responsible for the success of your affiliation with that company. If you want to do well, prepare. Have a professional-grade website. One consumers trust with their contact information. Have a strategy for the content you produce and how you promote posts or products.

The fitness craze is real! The unfit get fit and the fit get fitter! It is incredible how huge the fitness industry has become. And we’re talking about everything from fitness equipment to fitness supplement to fitness apparel. There is even a wide range of niches within the fitness niche! Think about it. There is weight loss, bodybuilding, running, capoeira, and that’s just a few of a seemingly limitless list!

We’ve talked about building up your network and developing an email list. Another way to promote products is by contacting that email list directly with the products you’re selling. Perhaps that email contains a code that results in a discount or maybe it’s just a link to your latest product review. Either way, it lands your website and product straight into consumer inboxes. You could consider writing a how-to article that gives users an idea of how they can make use of your product. affiliate 101 Amazon AM Days attribution BBJ Black Friday BlogHer Bonobos conferences CRM Customer Service Cyber Monday e-book Entrepreneur flex schedules Fraud Fremium FTC global Global Affiliate Google holidays incrementality Lending Bubble Mortage NDA Outsourcing Pacesetters Panda Pay Per Click Pinnacle Awards Rent the Runway Revenue Sales Strategy SEO ShareASale Shop.org small business Start-Up summer meeting trademark hijacking volunteering Wayfair webinar working parents

Leanne, that was great stuff. I saw some interesting delineators I’d never seen before, like how many subscribers you have making a difference in whether you should start with affiliates, at what level, etc. I appreciate the “ethical” angle you weaved throughout this, too, because affiliate marketing can/does have a bad reputation due to the way it’s been abused in the past. Your article will help educate current and future affiliate marketers, much appreciated!

Over the course of 6 months I’ve made $1300 with Amazon Affiliates alone with the majority of that coming from about 15 different posts. Each month I am seeing a steady and slow increase in my affiliate earnings as I continue to create content that recommends helpful products, even when my traffic is lower. My DA is at 39 and I average about 100,000 page views every month. Our program is built to provide our affiliate partners with an easy way to find and track their CMI and CMI event promotional efforts. It’s free to join and easy to get started. To start earning $100 on sales you refer, join the program through the link below. Add our links and banners to your website, social media channels, emails and newsletters to start spreading the word about events and valuable content marketing products. CMI gives you the assets – all you need to do is share with your community.
Additionally, feel free to seek out conversations with both consumers and other professionals. Send out LinkedIn invitations to those you think might be a good professional contact. Join Twitter conversations that are relevant to your industry or product. Physically attend networking events or conferences you think could result in a stronger network or more informed strategy. You’re a part of a community now, but other people don’t know that unless you show up.
The football snack helmet website is so simple, so short and sweet, yet it works! I can now see that sometimes, just taking a simple idea, and focusing completely on it, not complicating it will work. You have the wheels spinning in my head. Kids tablets are very popular these days, you see kids with them everywhere to keep them busy while waiting, etc. The site is perfect, steers the parents to information about them, and helps with the buying choice. Another great example!
I thought I would just bring something else to your attention; I did take a second to look at your site; you know why I left within just one second? EXACTLY! You have less then 3 seconds to make your first impression on visitors; if your visitors are bouncing off your site at the speed of light, they either found your site by mistake, or they were not impressed with your site, and left, which means? right, they did not trust your site!!! What happens if you have a high bounce rate? right, you can certainly lose rankings! Is google going to keep sending you traffic if you have nothing to offer? nope! I can not say this is your problem, or you could have multiple problems going on at the same time to cause you to lose rankings. I can tell you one thing for sure by just taking a 1 minute look at your link profile; You have quite a few links, and you have almost no authority, what does this mean? This most likely means you are spamming your link to poor quality sites. You also have a massive amount of do-follow links which does not look natural vs your no follow links, and with your site having low trust flow, do you think your site deserves that many do-follow links? I wonder what google thinks? at first glance, your anchor/link diversity does not look to bad, so your anchor/text does not look over-optimized, but whoever is building links for you, consider firing them immediately, as you are getting all the wrong links. I am going to assume at this point google has certainly given you a penalty; Your next move to to hire someone to audit your site, and start disavowing/removing bad links from your portfolio, over time, your rankings may come back, and that may depend on other factors also, but at this point, it certainly looks like you have link issues. Just a little bitty research goes a long way. good luck.
My domain currently has a DA of 55 and I get 250,000-300,000+ pageviews/month. Interestingly enough, I had similar earnings on Amazon when I had a lower DA and fewer pageviews (just 175,000). I don’t know how many pageviews all of my Amazon posts have, but the main ones that deliver nice income probably vary from around 1,000 – 6,000 pageviews per month each. It looks like it’s mainly 10 articles driving these sales.

The best way to find suitable brands to promote is by simply using a search engine using: '[Brand] + Affiliate Program'. Some companies run in-house affiliate programs however, this is a very specialist area. Therefore, most companies opt to employ an 'affiliate network' which has already built a large base of affiliates and gained years of experience in running successful programs for clients.

This book is a new entrant in our top 10 book list. The book teaches you to learn making money with affiliate marketing and become a successful marketer from scratch. You’ll learn how to create content and drive traffic using free and paid methods. The new book is the No. 1 bestseller on the topic while I was updating this page. A recommended read! 8Binary offers any level trader the opportunity to use market leading trading platforms to manage risk and maximize profits. With a truly global reach and renowned customer service, 8Binary is a secure and safe way to trade Binary Options. Committed to offering all of its clients the safest and most user-friendly experience, 8Binary is the trusted name in the market. Whether you are a beginner, retail investor or a professional trading entity, 8Binary guarantees the best user experience possible. Once you do move forward, don't resort to simply throwing up a handful of banner ads and call it good. All successful content-driven affiliates will tell you that deep integration of your marketing into your content is the most successful strategy, most of which can be accomplished by looking for affiliate tools outside of the quintessential and tired banner ad. 888.com is a premium gaming destination and a well established name in the casino and poker circuit. Its site offers numerous sub-brands including 888sport, 888ladies, 888bingo, 888casino and 888poker, as well as ReefClub Casino. The 888 family of companies attract millions of players, and the company provides affiliates with frequent promotions to keep players interested.
Let's pretend you love to cook and want to create a recipe blog. “Recipes” is a very competitive arena to build a brand new brand in. So you may want to narrow the focus a bit and choose a specific recipe style – low carb recipes, Paleo recipes, recipes portioned for one (AKA single people living alone), low-fat recipes, dessert recipes, holiday recipes, etc. Almost every broad niche has multiple sub-sects within it that may hold an opportunity for you. That said, I'd ensure the domain and brand you go with have the ability to expand into wider content and monetization opportunities as your brand grows.
I’ll talk about adding advertising to your book blog in the next post in this series (hey, there’s no reason to limit yourself to one source of income!), but, in the meantime, you may want to check out How You Can Make Money Promoting My Ebooks (and other people’s too), a post I did a couple of months ago. It talks more about Smashwords, in particular, and how to find authors offering high affiliate percentages over there.

VigLink is an intermediary platform, so it can serve as a backdoor for affiliates who have previously been banned/suspended from working with other affiliate programs like Amazon. And while you can choose specific merchants or offers, VigLink can be set up to work automatically by scanning your published content and dynamically generating affiliate links, making it a great choice for established content producers who are looking for a simpler way to generate revenue via an affiliate program.

This book is written in a question-and-answer format, which makes it especially simple for the affiliate marketing beginner. I found myself nodding right along with the list of questions, presented in the table of contents—it’s comforting to see the questions that you’re asking yourself laid out for you. Now you know that you’re not the only one wondering these things. I’ll talk about adding advertising to your book blog in the next post in this series (hey, there’s no reason to limit yourself to one source of income!), but, in the meantime, you may want to check out How You Can Make Money Promoting My Ebooks (and other people’s too), a post I did a couple of months ago. It talks more about Smashwords, in particular, and how to find authors offering high affiliate percentages over there. In the past, large affiliates were the mainstay, as catch-all coupon and media sites gave traffic to hundreds or thousands of advertisers. This is not so much the case anymore. With consumers using long-tail keywords and searching for very specific products and services, influencers can leverage their hyper-focused niche for affiliate marketing success. Influencers may not send advertisers huge amounts of traffic, but the audience they do send is credible, targeted, and has higher conversion rates.
One way to do that is to open company in a state that is accepted in Amazon affiliate program. I would suggest Delaware LLC company because is simple to open (little to no restrictions to non-residents) and not expensive to run. Maybe you start building site and once you get some traffic, you open company and setup amazon account. In the worst case scenario, you can still sell the site and earn some money that way.

I understand that you said at the end that these keywords would be too competitive for you to go after. But earlier you state, “You can also see on the adwords tool that this has high advertiser competition – this is a GOOD thing for you. This lets you know lots of people are buying ads for this term – more competition usually means more money for you.”

Good article! I think there are a lot of hopeful “wannabes” who want to get everything without doing the work. You don’t have to have 10+ years of experience or be the all-knowing guru at the top of the mountain, but you do have to be willing to invest in the effort that is required to be successful. However, I have made good headway into a number of niches by going against the grain. If they say you should post a lot on your current activity, I don’t. I tell my audience why I don’t, I make sure that they understand that I am different. Sometimes, however, to establish trust and rapport with your audience, you do need to offer some kinds of proof or authority. Its very difficult to fake these and its better if you know something about what you’re doing. Once you have more experience, it becomes easier to enter a niche and position yourself as an expert. It’s funny but you tend to get smarter and absorb more information as you move up in the internet marketing world. Thanks for the great information!
Fatherly is a website that tackles many different forms of content. Based on a similarweb.com lookup, they get about 22% of their traffic from organic search. Close to 25% of their traffic is direct, and almost 40% of it comes from social media (Facebook, Pinterest, etc.). It's important to take note of that because even though they may not be getting a ton of google organic traffic based on their keyword spread – they are getting a ton of traffic from social media platforms which no doubt has an immense impact on revenue.
Look for a gravity score of 30 or more, because these products have a proven track record of selling well for a number of different affiliates. Products, especially new products, with gravity scores under 30 may work but are more risky. Gravity scores of greater than 100 mean the product’s popular. You could have competition, but don’t worry about that. The important thing is that there’s lots of demand. The fitness craze is real! The unfit get fit and the fit get fitter! It is incredible how huge the fitness industry has become. And we’re talking about everything from fitness equipment to fitness supplement to fitness apparel. There is even a wide range of niches within the fitness niche! Think about it. There is weight loss, bodybuilding, running, capoeira, and that’s just a few of a seemingly limitless list!